Wanted to do a quick review, but it ended up being a bit more. I get CNET quick takes and reviews downloaded to my TiVo weekly. If there’s a breaking news about a product, I get it that same day.
This Friday’s show was about Bing bringing their 3D in to Bing Maps.
It was fascinating what features they have added and it piqued my interest in Bing in how fast it was when you zoom in and out and how quickly the map changes from map view to satellite view to bird’s eye view. Very impressive. Today I went for a spin and did a quick comparison between Google and Microsoft. There’s a slight difference in that Google Maps doesn’t have 3D modeling, neither does a regular Bing function. So for this, you have to download their 3D packages– Google Earth, and Microsoft’s Bing 3D Maps. Unfortunately, CNET didn’t mention this and if you watched their review, you would assume that it’s all part of the browser in bing.com. Not so! Once you download, I wanted to compare two of them side by side and I didn’t want to go to Manhattan, NY to compare. I think both products would try their best to get in applying their strengths to those areas or any other famous US spots. What I wanted to use was where I grew up: Kharkov, Ukraine.
Bing
You have to download their package, click on the icon after installation, and it brings up the application inside Internet Explorer (in my case, version 8). To quickly get to the area, I’ve typed in Kharkov, Ukraine and the globe spins and gets me to the center of the city.
Here’s where it gets tricky. The roads are not as clear as they are in Google overlay. And some of the roads are missing. For example, main road to the south of the city (Highway 18) is no where to be found. Thankfully, I know the vicinity of the area and I head south to find my house. It took about 5 minutes to do so due to the missing streets, unseen streets, and just that nasty tinted green — more on that later.
Here’s a screen-shot of Bing’s layout:
It’s not bad, but it when you compare it with Google’s, well, let’s get to that now.
Google:
Same exercise as with MS Bing, download, search, and find. The maps are more crisp though and here’s a nice little caveat, there are people who are creating all kinds of plug-ins for Google Earth. In this instance, I could have downloaded metro, tramway, or trolleybus stations, which makes things a lot quicker to find, even in a city like Kharkov. For this example, I didn’t even go that far, I was able to see and find streets fast in about 20 seconds, I was at the same spot that it took me to find with Bing in 5 mins.
Here’s a screen-shot of Google’s layout.
For me, this was easier on the eye, even as it doesn’t look as crisp in the thumbnail. You need to click on it for the full image. See the difference? Back to that green tint. I am not sure why MS’s maps always have it, but they really need to re-think that or apply some form of shading that eliminates that green tint.
Under the hood, it was more bad news for Bing. Inside the IE 8 browser, Bing was taking up almost 600K of memory. While Google Earth was at tepid 220K. Why? Maybe Microsoft should have made it more of a stand-alone application? You still have to download it. How is that an advantage?
Memory Utilization for Bing and Google Earth
In summary, Bing adds a non-ajax technology that does add speed, they also do rotating much better than Google’s Earth. But when it comes down to actually using it, seeing it, I would go with Google Earth. Let me conclude with that I am still happy Microsoft is trying to compete. It not only gives us — the user — an option, it does light a fire under competition’s proverbial ass to get them to better their products.
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